Our High Flyers at ITU World 2017, South Korea

Article Index

INNOCENT UDEOGU

PROJECT: UBENWA (Cry of a Baby)

Ubenwa is a mobile app technology that is able to diagnose birth asphyxia (the inability of a newly born to establish proper respiration after birth) in new born babies, which is responsible for 1.2 million deaths annually amongst babies and according to the World Health Organisation it is one of the three major causes of new born mortality globally and this is a serious problem in developing countries because we do not have the right equipment and they’re expensive.

In low resource setting it’s a problem diagnosing asphyxia. With this mobile app you can diagnose this in 10 seconds; it is cost-effective when compared with the normal machine. The diagnosis is done by just recording the baby’s cry through the app and it tells if the baby has asphyxia or not.

Ubenwa means cry of a child in my local dialect (Igbo). For the solution to be local we decided to pick a name that is local and to promote Nigeria instead of picking a name that is English.

The app is fully developed and it’s functional. But because it’s a health application we have to get licence to go ahead with deployment of the technology in the market. We are currently carrying out clinical trials to further validate the technology and whatever data we get from the trial we can go for a licence from the Ministry of Health.

ISHIAKU GWAMNA

PROJECT: myQ

myQ is a real time platform for inter-city road transporters. It works as an integrated platform to help the transporters to monitor station activities such as vehicle loading, passenger loading, ticket generation and sales, trip management and all other operations within the transport sector.

I decided to go into this because of the hassle most times when you want to travel from city to city or state to state. You have to physically go to these stations to see if there are vehicles available and when you get there even after paying you have to wait, sometimes for hours before the vehicle gets filled and sometimes it does even get filled before your arrival so you have to go to the next station.

The fact that there’s no proper information management system to take care of all these propelled us to come up with this technology. The app is a triplet app where the driver, clerk loading the vehicle and the passenger all have the app.

The passenger will download the app and the driver will use his own app to put his vehicle in a particular line loading to a particular destination, then the passenger will see that there is a particular vehicle loading and the number of people on board already, so he’s able to make reservation and then head to the station to meet the booking clerk who will scan his ticket, collect his money and put him on the vehicle.

When he’s on board, the driver will see that there’s an additional passenger on his vehicle and when the vehicle is full the app will alert him that the vehicle is full so that he can start a trip. After ending the trip all the tickets inside the vehicle will change to spent and this is how you keep monitoring your trip. While all this is happening, the transport company is also tracking all the transactions real time.

Vehicles can be tracked with our system. Once your vehicle is full, before you leave the queue you press a button that says start trip. Once you click on start trip the system will indicate that a driver with a particular number is on trip and you cannot go back to your destination to load again until it is seen that you have ended the trip you started. Once you end the trip it will be registered that you have offloaded the passengers at their destination and you’re about to get to the next destination to load another set of passengers back. So we track the vehicles whether they’re at the station or on the road.

The app is fully developed now and we’re about to do a mock test and to have some pilot companies come in. We’ve been here for two years, trying to talk to passengers, transporters, drivers’ associations, unions etc. to know how implementable it is and if it is something that will solve their problem and it’s been sparking a lot of interest. Hopefully by December 2017 we’ll launch our first pilot company in Lagos.

I am originally an electrical engineer from University of Maiduguri and then I specialised in Computer Information System (software engineering) in the US.